Dive Shop

On Cape Breton Island, and I’m fairly sure, in other places as well, there is a lovely purple flower that springs up at the side of the road in early summer. All flowers are sexy – they have to be, given that their purpose is almost entirely procreative – but some are sexier than others. Myself, I’m not especially turned on by sunflowers, but then, I’m not an insect. Maybe for an insect, size matters, I don't know.

But I digress. This is a very alluring flower, even for me, though I am unlikely to pollinate it. Close to the stem, it’s a kind of periwinkle blue and then about a third of the way up it changes abruptly to a rich, deep purple. I’m not sure what the adaptive purpose of this is: Why not have the change be gradual? It seems like more work to make it a hard right turn. But this is just one of many questions I don’t have the answer to.

Anyway, the plant that makes this purple flower is not really a plant in cultural terms, though it is of course biologically one. Culturally, we humans would call it a “weed.” Now our purple plant, like the honey badger, don’t give a shit. But we call it a weed because it is not a plant we find useful in any way. That’s why we have the word “weed.” It’s one of those cool words whose entire definition is that it is not something else. Like “alien” (not a citizen, not an earthling). A weed is very definitely a value judgment word. It is good to be a plant that serves human kind, either by being useful or beautiful. It is bad to crowd out the plants we have decided are good.

For that’s what a weed is especially hated for – its otherness and its superior strength. If a weed gets in your flower bed, you better run your ass off to Home Depot and get some nasty toxin that will probably make your grandchildren spontaneously grow two heads if they get within 20 feet. Because though very little in life is certain, it is a lock that the weed is going to kick your peonies’ little asses in about half an hour.

So this beautiful flower that grows by the side of the road on Cape Breton Island is a weed, which means that it’s hardy. Year in, year out, they arrive, they flourish, they paint the landscape with a color that serves as a much-needed foil to the deep greens that are this area’s leafy protagonist. They are the ruby red lipstick to the hills’ pale, powdered geisha face, they’re the flag flying on Iwo Jima, the lighthouse in the mist, the poet in a room full of fry cooks. 

But it wasn’t enough for me that they dotted the canvas with beauty. I wanted some for myself.

So, I went to the old woman on Airdrie Hill. She knew all there was to know. It was impossible to even guess at her age. She’d been here in Cape Breton for as long as anyone could remember. And I told her I wanted the purple flowers.

The old lady was known as McFoo. No first name. She wore a kilt and a yellow tank top, which I must say was not suited to a woman of her indeterminate years. She smoked a joint the size of a Cuban cigar and wore a Toronto Maple Leafs cap.

“You can’t have the purple flowers,” she said, picking something out of her yellow teeth.

“Why not?”

“They don’t like you,” she said. And laughed.

I told her they didn’t have to like me, they just had to grow on my land, within sight of my little cabin, so my wife and I could see them in the morning when we woke up.

“Dream on,” spat McFoo.

“Look,” I said, “do you have the seeds or not? Look at this place. How could you not have some seeds for the purple flowers? 

“I’ve got ‘em.”

“Well then?”

“I’ll give them to you, but you’re not going to be happy with the result. It’s a weed, boyo! Dontcha know what that means?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I don’t think you do. What it means is they don’t do what they’re told,” she said.

The old woman went into a back room and I heard her throwing things around there; it sounded like professional wrestling. Glass shattered, wood snapped and the cabin floor shook. There was a lot of grunting. Finally, she came out with a small Zip-Loc full of what looked like miniature pumpkin seeds. 

“Here ya go,” she said, and tossed them vaguely toward my hand. “And good luck with that,” she muttered as I walked out the door.

I didn’t waste any time. I planted those purple flower seeds in a bed right by my cabin and covered them with rich soil. I watered them when the weather was dry. I even threw in a little fertilizer from time to time. Every morning I went out there with my coffee to see whether any little weeds were poking their heads out. But nothing. Nothing.

The summer came and went, and no flowers appeared. The sun shone and the rain fell, and they didn’t come.

“They don’t like you.”

I’d returned the next year, convinced that McFoo had sold me a bill of goods. The first thing I did after opening up the cottage was to go pay a call on the old woman, who, unaccountably, was still with us.

“You gave me old seeds or something,” I said.

“All seeds are old,” she said. “They’ve been with us since before there was an ‘us’.”

“Don’t get philosophical on me, McFoo, I want the real thing this time. I don’t know what you gave me, but I did everything right and they didn’t grow.”

“Don’t like you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Got it.  Please give me some seeds that will work."

“No seeds will work. I told you that before.”

This was getting me nowhere.

“Okay, how about you just give me some more seeds – the best you have.”

The crone was ready for me. She’d had the seeds in the baggie before I even came in, and she grabbed them off an old scuba tank that was leaning against the wall and handed them to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. She had a new outfit – the kilt and tanktop had been replaced by a tie dye turtleneck, plaid pantaloons and a pair of pink high-top Cons.

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“No, thank you,” she said, and winked.

I bought a truckload of soil from the local nursery and three bags of pig shit. I got a soil tester from Home Depot that would tell me the amount of nitrogen, phosphate, etc., in the dirt. I went for a long walk along the shoulder of the main road and examined the conditions: the amount of sun the purple flowers got, the quality of the soil, the exposure they had to the wind. Then I went back to my cabin and recreated the closest possible environment. I spent a day digging out the nutrient-poor, clay-rich dirt from a 10x10 patch of ground and filling it in with the truckload of soil. I mixed in the pig shit and carefully deposited the seeds in holes dug 8 inches apart, as some guy on the Internet suggested. And I waited. The smell was bad. Something good had to come from this.

Two months later, there was nothing.

“Maybe it’s time to try something else, sweetie,” said my wife.

“That bitch.”

“What?”

We drove home at the end of the summer, and I was a complete turd the whole way home.

Four more summers. Four more summers with no purple flowers. Every piece of shitty little ground on the side of the main road had them, but all my efforts were for naught. I tried everything. I haunted gardener web forums. I even hired a highly recommended horticulturist from Halifax.

“I can’t explain it,” he finally said. “Usually, you have to work pretty hard not to get these weeds.”

So I gave up. I gave up on the sexy purple flowers that I had wanted to gaze at with my wife for five years. The flowers that I thought about while I went about my business in the real world. The flowers that had defeated me. The flowers that didn’t like me.

Then this summer I returned to Cape Breton, and there was an empty feeling inside me because I knew I wasn’t going to have this dimension in my life anymore. I felt silly for having tried for so many summers, for having let McFoo get inside my head, for being a city slicker totally out of his element with the simplest realities of natural life. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be here anymore. Things were tainted.

Then I turned into the mile-long dirt driveway that led to my little cabin on the shore. I drove 20 yards and stopped the car. I turned off the engine and got out. All along the road, for as far as the eye could see, were the purple flowers. I couldn’t believe it. I got back in the car and drove the curves slowly toward the sea. They were everywhere – deep purple splashes against the backdrop of green tree, brown earth, and limpid blue sky. I kept waiting for them to stop, but they never did. I parked the car at our little gravel parking field and walked down the Hansel & Gretel path to the cabin. Unlocked the door and walked through, walked to the window and saw the Strait of Northumberland and Margaree Island. I saw the cliffs receding south into the distance. And I saw the purple flowers. They were all over the place, lovely and erotic and irrepressible. They were everywhere … except the patch of ground where I’d been trying to grow them.

I drove back to the old woman’s house on the hill, but it was boarded up. On the front door was a scrawled sign etched with a knife into a piece of pressure-treated lumber – “Gone to Florida.” I asked at the grocery store in Inverness what had happened to McFoo, and the bat-faced woman at the register said she’d won a hefty lottery prize and had gone to open a dive shop in the Keys.

And that, my friends, is a true story.